Domestication

Nibbles: Coffee taxonomy, Agarwood trade, Apios promotion, Dog species concept, Seed collecting, Kudzu control, ICARDA chickpeas, Ancient maize beer, Quinoa landscapes, History of domestication, Breeding mistakes, EU breeding value, Priming, Wild flower ecotypes, Vitellaria use

Coffee botany resources.
Uncovering the illegal agarwood trade.
Developing the potato bean. First step: find a new name.
Dog taxonomy explained.
Project Baseline sets a, ahem, baseline, for studying plant diversity under climate change.
Ok, random shout-out for my niece Francesca’s work on kudzu bug natural control. Because I can. And she’s fabulous.
Blooming chickpeas!
The inhabitants of Casas Grandes brewed maize beer in the 14th century. Well of course they did.
Peruvian quinoa landscapes have a name: aynokas.
Crop domestication 101.
Where (commercial) breeders go wrong.
Presumably none of above mistakes are made by EU plant breeding companies.
Stimulating plant defences for faster response to pest and disease attack.
Germany told to go for local meadow seeds.
Use of shea butter trees goes way back.

This origin-of-dogs saga is getting tedious. Figure it out, already.
Dutch wheat varieties still improving.
Chinese ate wild grasses for 20,000 years before domesticating crops.
Fungal endophyte helps tall fescue cope with drought and high temperatures, but some fungal genotypes more than others. And some do it without producing livestock toxins.

BBC Food Programme on crop diversity in India, with a little help from Bioversity’s Stefano Padulosi (whose name manages to be pronounced in three different ways in 20 minutes.
How to measure photosynthesis on a grand scale.
The origins of our diet. It’s the interactions, stupid.
Barley as superfood. No, not the fermented kind.
More diverse freshwaters give higher fish yields.
European earthworm diversity mapped. No word on relationship with yields. Surprisingly difficult to see any correlation with agricultural intensification.
It’s been a bad time for livestock (and therefore people) in Mongolia and in Ethiopia.
Domesticating the wild mango that is not a mango but is almost as tasty.
The weird world of the pure caffeine trade.

If you’re going to grown switchgrass as a biofuel, grow it in variety mixtures.
The two wild parents of the cultivated peanut get sequenced.
As also does common bean from its Mesoamerican genepool. Happy International Year of Pulses.
New wild Aussie tomato gets a cool name. No word on when it will be sequenced. Or how long it will last.
Speaking of climate change in Australia, wine might be in trouble.
And more from Down Under: new book on indigenous Australian foods. Some of which may have been cultivated.
Lots of herbarium specimens have the wrong name. Well I never.
CIMMYT and ICARDA collaborate on wheat diversity.
Roman wine rising again from the ashes of Pompeii.
Exhibition on Colombia’s food plants.
Portuguese green broth is no doubt very nice, but definitely needs a new name.
The ancient urban gardens of Istanbul live on.
Kenya gets on top of using biodiversity for climate change adaptation. Or on top of developing a strategy for doing so, anyway.
Ola Westengen has a strategy, but you have to speak Norwegian to hear about it.
Hybrid wheat is 5 years away. How long have they been saying that?
The latest Rice Today has an article on genebank tourism by Mike Jackson (p. 39), who should know.
Iowa State University is offering $900 to eat 3 orange bananas.
Sahaju: saving agricultural biodiversity in India the organic way. Cheaper than $900 too.
Want to multiply up coconuts really fast? They know how to do it in the Philippines.